The Hills Are a Prop, the Show Is Live

NBC Will Air ‘The Sound of Music’ Live on Dec. 5

Carrie Underwood, front, on the set of “The Sound of Music.”Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Weeks before “The Sound of Music” goes live for one night only on NBC, the actors were fretting about some scenes more than others.

Carrie Underwood, who stars as the transformative governess, Maria, was nervous about pulling off her extended, spin-heavy dance scene with Stephen Moyer’s Captain von Trapp. Christian Borle, who will play the captain’s friend Max Detweiler, was banking ad-libs, he said, in case he breaks his nose during one scene that includes a blindfolded tumble into a fountain.

But for the people charged with producing the high-wire spectacle, which will be broadcast on Thursday night, the concerns were somewhat broader. “I have three hours to screw up,” said Beth McCarthy-Miller, who will direct the telecast. “Mikes could go out, music cues could not happen, cameras could go down — there are so many things that could go wrong.”

She added, deadpan: “Thank you for bringing it up.”

Conceived by the producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, veteran interpreters of Broadway for television and movies, this new “Sound of Music” seeks to reprise not the hallowed 1965 Julie Andrews film but the original Rodgers and Hammerstein show, which opened on Broadway in 1959 and won the Tony for best musical.

Most of the chatter about the production has surrounded the casting of Ms. Underwood, the country music superstar — an unexpected choice that actually makes sense for multiple artistic and commercial reasons. “I was getting hate-tweets like, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ ” she said.

But the big surprise is that at a time when conventional wisdom holds that any live singing or dancing contest gets decent ratings, at least initially, someone is trying to produce a lavish two-hour-plus musical, with multiple sets and non-Broadway actors in high-profile roles, live for presumably millions of viewers. (Those on the West Coast will watch a delayed airing.)

The person most responsible for making sure everything comes off gracefully is Ms. McCarthy-Miller, who is rare among television directors in that she is a live specialist. After breaking in at MTV directing “Unplugged” and special events, some live and some not, she was at the helm of “Saturday Night Live” for 11 years and, more recently, two live broadcasts of “30 Rock.”

“The Sound of Music,” staged by Ms. McCarthy-Miller’s co-director, Rob Ashford, is “kind of a unique beast,” she said. Unlike, say, “30 Rock,” there is no established template, but unlike a Video Music Awards telecast, there is a narrative flow that must be conveyed along with the singing and dancing.

Indeed, the project harks back to the 1950s, when similar productions of “Peter Pan” and “Cinderella” were early television landmarks.

The motivations are thoroughly modern, however, as broadcasters seek new ways to mitigate the ratings attrition brought on by delayed DVR viewing. Event programs like sports contests and award shows, and reality competitions like NBC’s own “The Voice,” are among the few offerings that both reliably draw viewers during the broadcast and generate real-time buzz via social media. Though past juggernauts like the “American Idol” results shows have fallen off in recent years, programmers are still “looking for ways to bring the audience in that will watch things live,” said Jennifer Salke, president of entertainment for NBC.

Moreover, television’s renewed interest in musicals, though perhaps not as intense as in the peak “Glee” days, is still apparent. (See, for example, the musical version of USA’s “Psych” scheduled for Dec. 15.)

By reinterpreting the Broadway staging of the von Trapp saga, the producers (whose credits include “Cinderella” and “Annie” for television, “Chicago” for film) say they can trade on the warm feelings people have for the film without having to compete with it. In broad strokes, the two are identical — an Austrian nun-turned-governess redeems and then joins a family, sings, flees from Nazis — but devotees will notice differences. For example, “My Favorite Things,” sung by Maria in the film to calm the children during a thunderstorm, is in the stage show a duet between the character and the Mother Abbess, portrayed by Audra McDonald. (The cast also includes the actress and singer Laura Benanti as the Baroness and dancers borrowed from current Broadway shows including “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and “Motown: The Musical.”)

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Mr. Ashford, who worked with the producers on the recent Broadway revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and this year’s Oscars telecast, oversaw the rehearsals in TriBeCa and prepared the actors as he would for a straightforward stage musical. The performers will sing live to a recorded score and do so for no one but the crew — there will be no audience.

“You finish a number and nobody’s clapping,” said Mr. Borle, a theater veteran who allowed that getting used to the silence was tricky. On Broadway, it means “I am failing,” he said.

In Ms. Underwood the producers have a telegenic performer with multiplatinum pipes who brings plenty of experience singing live on tours, awards shows and television — her break came in 2005 when she won “American Idol” — as well as a “great crossover audience,” Ms. Salke said. (Ms. McCarthy-Miller added that her own time at MTV taught her that country artists are the easiest musicians to work with.)

Ms. Underwood, who grew up in tiny Checotah, Okla., had never done theater in any context. “We didn’t even have a drama club,” she said through a cold in a drafty rehearsal studio in TriBeCa.

The singer did, however, watch “The Sound of Music” annually with her family and she threw herself into the project, traveling to Salzburg, Austria, to see von Trapp sites and working with theatrical vocal coaches to temper her twang. “I’m going to sound like me no matter what, but I really want to fit in,” she said. “It shouldn’t be like: ‘And now Maria the country superstar starts singing.’ ”

By the time the production moved to a cavernous soundstage on Long Island at the end of November, Ms. Underwood’s cold had cleared and she made a convincing Maria, dressed in a pert brown tweed suit with her golden hair crowned in a thick braid. (A matching brown hat was too small and sent off for adjustments.)

It was time for camera and wardrobe testing, the beginning of a mostly tedious day of mapping out each shot and camera movement. The fresh sets gleamed in a row, arranged for easy navigation of cameras and actors during the live show. Maria’s room sat beside the von Trapp terrace, the abbey beside the mountain. At the cusp of the majestic Alps — actually a tromp l’oeil backdrop — a stagehand in a tropical print shirt watered a fir. Jarringly, three immense Nazi banners hung in an appropriately shadowy recess.

While Mr. Ashford oversaw the studio rehearsals, the soundstage was Ms. McCarthy-Miller’s domain. After a morning leading stagehands through a halfhearted “Do-Re-Mi” dance routine, for the benefit of camera operators, she spent the bulk of the day at a monitor coaching actors through minute bits of action to plot out the shots she will use during the telecast. As she scrolled through camera angles, she called out favorites to an assistant, who jotted them down, in order, in a script.

“It’s such a painstaking process for the actors,” Ms. McCarthy-Miller said later, “because it’s literally like: ‘Stop! O.K., go back and do that line again. Stop!’ ”

The effect was like an endless, if sublimely lit game of red light, green light, but slowly the production began to take shape. Someone called lunch and Ms. McCarthy-Miller sat next to the von Trapp fountain of Mr. Borle’s nightmares. She seemed calm but admitted, “I have heart palpitations” from considering all the preparations that remained. Later that day would come the first camera test of a musical number — “Do-Re-Mi” — with each sprightly step taking the production closer to opening and closing night.

“It’s going to happen once and once only,” she said, with a mix of excitement and relief. “It’s very hard in this day and age to find things that are unique.”

Correction: December 15, 2013

An article on Dec. 1 about NBC’s live TV version of “The Sound of Music,” using information from the network, erroneously attributed a distinction to the 1957 live CBS production of “Cinderella.” Many other live TV versions of musicals have been broadcast since 1957; CBS’s “Cinderella” was not the last one.

A version of this article appears in print on December 1, 2013, on Page AR24 of the New York edition with the headline: The Hills Are a Prop, the Show Is Live. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe